At
Rensselaer

From a fourth-floor window
in the Gurley Building in downtown Troy, a visitor can gaze eastward at
The Approach, West Hall, the former Winslow Laboratory, and the rest of
the Rensselaer campus.

It's an appropriate
vista for a reclamation project that forges another link between the
city and the school.

"So many historic
buildings have been lost over the years. We're fortunate to get the
Gurley Building. Gurley himself was a graduate," said Russell Leslie
'80, associate director of Rensselaer's Lighting Research Center (LRC).

The School of Architecture's
LRC, the world's foremost research and education center dedicated to
lighting, has taken up residence in the 133-year-old Gurley Building.
Renovation of the structure was completed this spring and a formal dedication
took place in June.

The LRC outgrew
its 17,000-square-foot quarters in Watervliet. The Gurley Building's
25,000 square feet, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street,
better accommodate the center's 40-member faculty and staff, 20 graduate
students, and some 1,000 visitors a year.

The center spends
more than $4 million on research and education in lighting. Its researchers
are investigating a vast array of projects, from the effects of lighting
on night-shift nurses and the best snowplow lighting for driver safety,
to how changes in lighting affect brain waves. Other areas of research
include the effect of light on people with such conditions as Alzheimer's
disease, breast cancer, and seasonal affective disorder.

The Gurley Building
was named a National Historic Landmark in 1983. Leslie, the architect
who designed the building's transformation, sought to retain much of
its 19th-century flavor while turning it into a state-of-the-art lighting
research center. Inside, the brick walls, timber framing, round wooden
columns, and most of its plank floors remain intact.

That's the question
infused in a multimedia installation that targets violence in computer
games. The installation, designed by Kathleen Ruiz, assistant professor
of electronic arts, features an interactive video game and mural-size
digital photos that reveal surprising behavior by game participants.
The exhibit, titled "Bang, Bang (you're not dead?)," is on
display at the Woodstock Artists Association in Woodstock, N.Y., through
Oct. 16.

The installation
depicts participants engrossed in virtual games of death and war, sometimes
oblivious to the real world. At times, they are sweating and grimacing.

"The installation
satirizes the seductive nature of traditional military-style games,
exploring the thin line between fantasy and reality. It also inspires
dialogue and offers new alternatives for interacting in virtual environments,"
Ruiz says. "We can use 3-D narratives that express more of the
human conditionpoetic, personal, satirical, comical, etc ... We
can use the technology to express other things than simply killing each
other."

Ruiz, an internationally
known artist whose exhibits have been displayed around the world, explores
consciousness, behavior and interaction, and restructured reality.

She created the
exhibit in response to visits to gaming arcades and the questions that
have been raised about links between particular types of shooting found
in virtual games and the kinds of violence occurring in recent multiple
killings.

Ruiz says her project
should not be portrayed as an anti-gun or anti-game model.

Rensselaer took the formula
car international this year and came back a winner.

"This is the
best position the team has ever had in the formula car competitions,"
said Euan Somerscales, faculty adviser for the Formula SAE (Society
of Automotive Engineers) Team.

Although student
teams have been competing in formula car contests since 1991, this is
the first time Rensselaerwhich came in third placehas competed
internationally.

The competition
was based on design, cost, presentation, maneuverability, and endurance.
The team's ultimate strength was in the endurance and fuel economy event,
which was a 10.44-mile time trial over a twisting and undulating course.

The students participated
with 17 teams from around the world. The Rensselaer team's top performance
in England has energized the students for upcoming competitions in 2001
in Pontiac, Mich., where the students hope to repeat their top-10 standing
of 1998, when they placed 8th out of 100 teams.

The Rensselaer team,
made up of about a dozen students, invested thousands of hours in fund
raising, construction, testing, and driver practice over the past year
to prepare for the overseas competition.

Daniel
Walczyk (left) and Badri Roysam in front of the machine
they designed for faster results in the initial testing
of potential drugs and other products. Photo by Gary Gold

Once, the only way to find
out if a potential new product could be linked to cancer and other diseases
was to expose it to large numbers of rats or other laboratory animals
to see if any of them developed genetic damage.

But a robotic system
developed by researchers at Rensselaer is now available that rapidly
scans cell cultures to detect if potential new products could be harmful.

The RPI SHE Machine,
developed by Badri Roysam, associate professor of electrical, computer,
and systems engineering, and Daniel Walczyk, assistant professor of
mechanical engineering, is faster than animal testing (weeks instead
of months), requires far fewer animals, and correlates strongly with
animal tests.

The system performs
automatic scoring of the SHE (Syrian Hamster Embryo) Cell Transformation
Assay. In this procedure, cells of a hamster embryo are exposed to the
substance and cultured in 250 petri dishes. Lab technicians scan these
cell colonies looking for abnormalities.

A dozen petri dishes
are attached to each of 21 trays in an elevator mechanism. An automatic
feeder brings one tray at a time to a scanning mechanism, and a motion
stage follows a computer-controlled pattern that places each dish under
the scanner. A computer algorithm analyzes the images and uses objective
standards to classify and label colonies as normal or abnormal.

The Rensselaer SHE
Machine was developed with support from Procter & Gamble and Covance
Corp. Covance, one of the world's largest and most comprehensive drug
development services companies, is scheduled to use the first prototype
by the end of summer.

Construction of
the Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory (MDL) in the former high bay
area of the Jonsson Engineering Center is in full force and is expected
to be completed in December.

The MDL will provide
undergraduate students from multiple engineering disciplines, management,
humanities, architecture, and science with a facility and the resources
to work together on challenging "real-world" problems, according
to Mark Steiner '78, clinical associate professor of mechanical engineering,
aeronautical engineering, and mechanics, and MDL director.

The multidisciplinary
nature of the lab will be enhanced by the method of learning, Steiner
says. Instead of preparing a cut-and-dried syllabus, professors act
as student team advisers. Students work together in self-directed teams
and build upon knowledge gained from prior courses to solve real problems
that are important to a project sponsor.

The flexible design
of the space, which will accommodate up to 70 students, will allow for
small and large group interaction. The facility also will provide space
for students to fabricate, assemble, and test physical prototypes. While
this is a more complicated way to teach, Steiner says, the experience
more effectively prepares students for their careers.

"The combination
of our 'MDL' capstone design course, which partners teams of students
from departments across the Institute with industry partners to work
on real-world, interdisciplinary projects, together with our new, state-of-the-art
facility, will make the Rensselaer MDL experience unique among universities
with similar programs," says Dean of Engineering Bud Baeslack '78.
"The Swanson MDL facility is special in that it will provide an
environment that is highly effective in preparing the student for the
engineering workplace of the 21st century. We will soon have a multi-functional,
comprehensive facility that will allow teams of students to work together
to create innovative designs using state-of-the-art CAD systems, develop
rapid prototype components, and assemble and test the final products."

During the 1999-2000
academic year, four sponsored projects were successfully piloted engaging
more than 100 students from six engineering disciplines. Current MDL
project sponsors include GE, GM, Barclays Capital, and Pitney Bowes.
Each project is funded by a $40,000 grant.

The facility will
be formally named the O.T. Swanson Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory
in memory of Trustee Robert Swanson's father, whose values and encouragement
contributed so much to his son's education and career. Last year, Swanson
'58, retired executive vice president and director of Mobil, and his
wife, Cynthia J. Shelvin, offered a $750,000 challenge to the Institute
to raise an additional 750,000 for the lab. Rensselaer met that challenge
before the end of 1999 and the couple matched the amount dollar for
dollar.

In the entrepreneurial food
chain, "AQ"one's ability to persevere in the face of
adversitymay matter more than "IQ," says Gideon Markman,
an assistant professor of management at the Lally School of Management
and Technology. In other words, the ability to overcome what appears
to be insurmountable business and technological difficulties is probably
more important than the idea or the opportunity itself.

Markman tested the
AQ of 200 patent holders, building on the work of Paul Stoltz, author
of Adversity Quotient. What Markman found was that entrepreneurial
inventors who used their patents to start companies had higher AQs than
those who didn't use their patents for that purpose.

Markman says that
measuring AQ could be a crystal ball for venture capitalists and corporate
entrepreneurship. AQ measures can be used to screen and identify technical
people who will successfully champion new business units.

"Prospective
entrepreneurs are presenting investors with new, complex, and sometimes
highly uncertain technologies," Markman says. "And while venture
capitalists may assess the technology, industry, and market with some
accuracy, they are rather uncertain on how to assess an entrepreneur's
potential. Measuring a technical inventor's AQ may substantially improve
backers' investment portfolios."

Faced with similar
business opportunities and obstacles, technical entrepreneurs differed
in the way they perceive and react to adversity. Markman found that
high AQ was associated with higher personal earnings among patent holders,
and that they experience higher levels of perceived control and accountability
for the products they bring to market.

"These people
do not consider themselves victims of adversity, but rather rise to
any obstacle or challenge put in their way," Markman says. "To
them, adversity is a speed bump, not a mountain. They don't just identify
opportunities, they successfully nurture and harvest them."

Respondents were
on average 47 years old, had almost 20 years of formal education, held
more than 13 patents at the time of the survey, and had earned almost
$120,000 annually. The average entrepreneur had started 1.5 firms with
two co-founders and had raised more than $6 million to build his or
her company.